CHAPTER XVIII

[Contents]CHAPTER XVIIITHE COLLABORATORS: (CONTINUED)Not all the naturalist’s experiments are dedicated to practical folk; some are reserved rather for the intellectual. Let us proceed to the facts:To-day is Shrove Tuesday, a reminiscence of the ancient Saturnalia. I am meditating, on this occasion, a fantastic dish which would have delighted the gourmets of Rome.…There will be eight of us; first of all my family, and then two friends, probably the only persons in the village before whom I could permit myself such eccentricities of diet without jocular comment upon what would be regarded as a depraved mania.One of these is the schoolmaster. Since he permits it and does not fear the comments of the foolish, if by chance the secret of our feast should be divulged, we will call him by his name, Jullian. A man of broad views and reared upon science, his mind is open to truth of every kind.The second, Marius Guigne, is a blind man who, a carpenter by profession, handles his plane and saw in the blackest darkness with the same[275]sureness of hand as that of a skilful-sighted person in broad daylight. He lost his sight in his youth, after he had known the joys of light and the wonders of colour. As a compensation for perpetual darkness he has acquired a gentle philosophy, always smiling; an ardent desire to fill, as far as possible, the gaps in his meagre primary education; a sensitiveness of hearing able to seize the subtle delicacies of music; and a fineness of touch most extraordinary in fingers calloused by the labours of the workshop. During our conversations, if he wishes to be informed as to this or that geometrical property, he holds out his widely-opened hand. This is our blackboard. With the tip of my forefinger, I trace on it the figure to be constructed; accompanying my light touches with a brief explanation. This is enough; the idea is grasped, and the saw, plane, and lathe will translate it into reality.On Sunday afternoons, in winter especially, when three logs flaming on the hearth form a delicious contrast to the brutalities of the Mistral, they meet in my house. The three of us form the village Athenæum, the Rural Institute, where we speak of everything except hateful politics.… At such a meeting, the delight of my solitude, to-day’s dinner was devised. The special dish consists of thecossus, a delicacy of great renown in ancient times.When he had eaten a sufficient number of nations, the Roman, brutalised by excess of luxury, began to eat worms. Pliny tells us: “Romanis in hoc luxuria esse cœpit, prægrandesque roborum[276]vermes delicatiore sunt in cibo: Cossos vocant.” (The Romans have reached such a degree of luxury at the table that they esteem as delicious tit-bits the great worm from the oak-tree known as Cossus.)I do not know with what sauce the Cossus was eaten in the days of the Cæsars, the Apicius of the period having left us no information on this point. Ortolans are roasted on a spit; it would be profaning them to add the relish of complicated preparation. Let us proceed in the same manner with the Cossus, these Ortolans of entomology. Spitted in rows, they are exposed on the grill to the heat of live embers. A pinch of salt, the necessary condiment of our dish, is the only addition made to it. The roast grows golden, softly sizzling, weeps a few oily tears which catch fire on contact with the coals and burn with a white flame. It is done! Let us serve it hot.Encouraged by my example, my family bravely attack their roast. The schoolmaster hesitates, the dupe of his imagination, which sees the great grubs of a little while ago crawling across his plate. He has taken for himself the smaller specimens, as the recollection of these disturbs him less. Less subject to imaginary dislikes, the blind man ruminates and savours them with every sign of satisfaction.The testimony is unanimous. The roast is juicy, tender, and extremely tasty. One recognises in it a certain flavour of burnt almonds which is enhanced by a vague aroma of vanilla. In short,[277]the vermicular dish is found to be highly acceptable, one might even say excellent. What would it be if the refined art of the gourmets of antiquity had cooked it!…If I have made this investigation it was certainly not in the hope of enriching the bill of fare. The rarity of the great grubs and the repugnance which all kinds of vermin arouses in most of us will always stand in the way of my discovery becoming a common dish.…As far as I am concerned, it was still less the desire for a dainty mouthful that actuated me. My sobriety is not easily tempted. A handful of cherries pleases me better than the preparations of our kitchens. My only desire was to elucidate a point of natural history.1I certainly admire this zeal for science and this absence of prejudice even in the choice of food; yet I am tempted to remark that in the matter of intrepidity, whether in respect of food or of science, there is one of Fabre’s circle of acquaintances who surpassed the schoolmaster and perhaps equals Fabre himself. I am referring to Favier. Who, then, is Favier?Favier is an old soldier. He has pitched his hut of clay and branches under the African carob-trees;[278]he has eaten sea-urchins at Constantinople; he has shot starlings in the Crimea, during a lull in the firing. He has seen much and remembered much. In winter, when work in the fields ends at four o’clock and the evenings are long, he puts away rake, fork, and barrow, and comes and sits on the hearth-stone of the kitchen fireplace, where the billets of ilex-wood blaze merrily. He fetches out his pipe, fills it methodically with a moistened thumb and smokes it solemnly. He has been thinking of it for many a long hour; but he has abstained, for tobacco is expensive. The privation has doubled the charm; and not one of the puffs recurring at regular intervals is wasted.Meanwhile, we start talking. Favier is, in his fashion, one of those bards of old who were given the best seat at the hearth, for the sake of their tales; only my story-teller was formed in the barrack-room. No matter: the whole household, large and small, listen to him with interest; though his speech is full of vivid images, it is always decent. It would be a great disappointment to us if he did not come, when his work was done, to take his ease in the chimney-corner.What does he talk about to make him so popular? He tells us what he saw of thecoup d’Etatto which we owe the hated Empire; he talks of the brandy served out and of the firing into the mob. He—so he assures me—always aimed at the wall; and I accept his word for it, so distressed does he appear to me and so ashamed of having taken a hand, however innocent, in that felon’s game.[279]He tells us of his watches in the trenches before Sebastopol; he speaks of his sudden terror when, at night, all alone on outpost duty, squatting in the snow, he saw fall beside him what he calls a flower-pot. It blazed and flared and shone and lit up everything around. The infernal machine threatened to burst at every second; and our man gave himself up for lost. But nothing happened: the flower-pot went out quietly. It was a star-shell, an illuminating contrivance fired to reconnoitre the assailant’s outworks in the dark.The tragedy of the battle-field is followed by the comedy of the barracks. He lets us into the mysteries of the stew-pan, the secrets of the mess, the humorous hardships of the cells. And, as his stock of anecdotes, seasoned with racy expressions, is inexhaustible, the supper hour arrives before any of us has had time to remark how long the evening is.Favier first attracted my notice by a master-stroke. One of my friends had sent me from Marseilles a pair of enormous Crabs, the Maia, the Sea-spider or Spider-crab of the fishermen. I was unpacking the captives when the workmen returned from their dinner: painters, stone-masons, plasterers engaged in repairing the house which had been empty so long. At the sight of those strange animals, studded with spikes all over the carapace and perched on long legs that give them a certain resemblance to a monstrous Spider, the onlookers gave a cry of surprise, almost of alarm. Favier, for his part, remained unmoved; and, as he skilfully[280]seized the terrible Spider struggling to get away, he said:“I know that thing; I’ve eaten it at Vasna. It’s first-rate.”And he looked round at the bystanders with an air of humorous mockery which was meant to convey:“You’ve never been out of your hole, you people.”Favier knows many things; and he knows them more particularly through having eaten them. He knows the virtues of a Badger’s back, the toothsome qualities of the leg of a Fox; he is an expert as to the best part of that Eel of the bushes, the Snake; he has browned in oil the Eyed Lizard, the ill-famedRassadeof the South; he has thought out the recipe of a fry of Locusts. I am astounded at the impossible stews which he has concocted during his cosmopolitan career.I am no less surprised at his penetrating eye and his memory for things. I have only to describe some plant, which to him is but a nameless weed, devoid of the least interest; and, if it grows in our woods, I feel pretty sure that he will bring it to me and tell me the spot where I can pick it for myself. The botany of the infinitesimal even does not foil his perspicacity.But, above all, he excels in ridding me of the troublesome folk whom I meet upon my rambles. The peasant is naturally curious, as fond of asking questions as a child; but his curiosity is flavoured with a spice of malice and in all his questions there[281]is an undercurrent of chaff. What he fails to understand he turns into ridicule. And what can be more ludicrous than a gentleman looking through a glass at a Fly captured with a gauze net, or a bit of rotten wood picked up from the ground? Favier cuts short the bantering catechism with a word.2Favier has other qualities: he does not hesitate in the face of difficulties, and it is a point of honour with him to acquit himself manfully, however arduous the task.Favier is not content with faithfully executing his master’s orders. Like all intelligent and devoted servants, he divines and anticipates his desires. He has happy ideas of initiative.On the 14th of April 1880, Favier was clearing away a heap of mould resulting from the waste weeds and leaves heaped up in a corner against the enclosing wall.… In the midst of his work with spade and wheelbarrow, he suddenly called me:“A find, sir, a splendid find! Come and look!”I hurried up. There, indeed, was a splendid discovery, and of a kind to fill me with delight, reawakening all my old memories of the Bois des Issarts.3[282]There swarmed a whole population of Scarabæi, in the form of larvæ, nymphs, and adult insects. There, too, were crowds of Rose-beetles (Cetoniæ), all stages being represented. There, too, were great numbers of Scoliæ, the Two-striped Scoliæ having recently emerged from their cocoons, which still had beside them the skins of the game served to the larvæ; and there, before the naturalist’s eyes, was the solution of the problem of the Scolia’s food, which “his painful researches in the Bois des Issarts had not enabled him to solve.”4Less than this had been needed for Favier to merit mention in the order of the day!At the beginning of this chapter should we not have placed the insects themselves at the head of Fabre’s collaborators in his researches? When the insect takes a hand, Favier himself is out of the running.In the meantime we have no intention of belittling Favier, or of retracting the praise which has been lavished upon him. Despite his inevitable deficiencies, and sometimes even because of them, Fabre owes him much. He owes him important manual services; he owes him curious data and inestimable discoveries; lastly, he owes him hitherto unknown opinions[283]relating to evolution, for Favier is an evolutionist, and a highly original one.For him the bat is a rat that has grown wings; the cuckoo is a sparrow-hawk that has retired from business; the slug, a snail which, through advancing age, has lost its shell; the night-jar, theetraoucho-grepaou, as he calls it, is an old toad which, having developed a passion for milk, has grown feathers in order to enter the folds and milk the goats. It would be impossible to get these fantastic ideas out of his head. Favier is, as will be seen, an evolutionist after his fashion, and a daring evolutionist. Nothing gives him pause in tracing the descent of animals. He has a reply for everything: this comes from that. If you ask why, he replies: “See how like they are!”Shall we reproach him for these insanities when we hear scientists acclaiming the pithecanthropos as the precursor of man, led astray as they are by the formation of the monkey? Shall we reject the metamorphoses of thechavucho-grapaouwhen there are men who will seriously tell us that in the present condition of science it is absolutely proved that man is descended from some vaguely sketched monkey? Of the two transformations Favier’s seems to me the more admissible. A painter, a friend of mine, the brother of the great musician, Félicien David, imparted to me one day his reflections concerning the human structure. “Vé, moun bel ami,” he said, “vé: l’homé a lou dintré d’un por et[284]loudéforo d’uno mounino” (Man has the inside of a pig and the outside of a monkey). I recommend the painter’s jest to those who wish to derive man from the wild boar, when the monkey is out of fashion. According to David the descent is confirmed by internal resemblances: “L’homé a lou dintré d’un por.”And, therefore, the naturalist proceeds to make some wise reflections which we owe in the first place to Favier:Let us avoid generalisations that are not founded upon sufficiently numerous and solid foundations. Where these foundations are lacking the child is the great generaliser.For him the feathered race means just the bird, and the reptile family the snake, without other differences than those of magnitude. Ignorant of everything, he generalises to the utmost, simplifying in his inability to see the complex. Later on he will learn that the Sparrow is not the Bullfinch, that the Linnet is not the Greenfinch; he will particularise, and he will do so more and more daily as his faculty of observation is more widely exercised. At first he saw nothing but resemblances, now he sees differences, but not yet so clearly as to avoid incongruous comparisons and zoological solecisms like those which my gardener utters.5[285]This chapter was to have taken the form of a letter addressed to Charles Darwin, the illustrious naturalist who now lies buried beside Newton in Westminster Abbey. It was my task to report to him the result of some experiments which he had suggested to me in the course of our correspondence: a very pleasant task, for, though facts, as I see them, disincline me to accept his theories, I have none the less the deepest veneration for his noble character and his scientific honesty. I was drafting my letter when the sad news reached me: Darwin was dead:6after searching the mighty question of origins, he was now grappling with the last and darkest problem of the hereafter.7This is what we need at the head of the seventh chapter of the second volume of theSouvenirs. Especially coming after what has gone before them, these few lines shed a more brilliant light upon Fabre’s secret attitude toward those very thinkers whose ideas he opposes most keenly than could any number of lectures. We have here the practical exemplification of that beautiful profession of faith inspired by Saint Augustine, which he has recorded elsewhere: “I wage war boldly upon those ideas that I believe untrue:[286]but God preserve me from ever doing so upon those who maintain them.”8In his constant skirmishes against the theory of evolution, even in the set battles which he occasionally fights, whenever he writes Charles Darwin’s name he mentions it with evident accents of respect and sympathy, gladly referring to him as “the master,” “the illustrious master,” “the venerated master.”On his part the English scientist does full justice to the French scientist’s incomparable mastery in the study of insects. We have often mentioned the title of “inimitable observer” which he gives him in his work on theOrigin of Species. In a letter dated the 16th of April 1881, he wrote to Mr. Romanes, who was preparing a book onAnimal Intelligence: “I do not know whether you[287]would care to discuss in your book some of the more complicated and marvellous instincts. It is an ungrateful task.… But if you discuss some of these instincts, it seems to me that you could not take a more interesting point than that of the animals that paralyse their prey, as Fabre has described in his astonishing memoir in theAnnales des sciences naturelles, a memoir which he has since amplified in his admirableSouvenirs.”When he wrote this Darwin was acquainted only with the first volume of theSouvenirs.9What would he have said if he could have enjoyed the whole of the learned entomologist’s masterly work?In reading this first volume, the attention of the English naturalist had been especially struck by the operations of the Hunting Wasps, which were peculiarly upsetting to his theories.Darwin was visibly preoccupied by the problem of instinct as propounded by the irrefutable observations of the French entomologist, but he did not despair of finding a solution in conformity with his system. Fabre, on his side, believed that his position[288]was inexpugnable, and was not without hope of converting Darwin by what appeared to him to be the evidence of the facts.Nowhere does the theory of evolution come full tilt against so immovable an obstacle. Darwin, a true judge, did not fail to realise this. He greatly dreaded the problem of the instincts. My first results in particular had left him anxious. If he had known the tactics of the Hairy Ammophila, the Mantis-hunting Tachytus, the Philanthus apivorus, the Calicurgus, and other predatory insects which have since been investigated, his anxiety, I believe, would have become a frank avowal of his inability to get instinct to enter the world of his formula. Alas! the philosopher of Down left us when the discussion was only just beginning, with experiment to fall back upon, a method superior to all arguments. The little that I had published at that period left him still some hope of explanation. In his eyes instinct is always an acquired habit.We have already mentioned Fabre’s relations with Moquin-Tandon, Dufour, Pasteur, and Duruy. Other names might be added to complete the list of his friends, or the correspondents whom he succeeded in interesting in entomology and admitting more or less to participation in his researches.10We[289]will confine ourselves here to mentioning a worthy Brother of the Christian Colleges who afforded him one of the great pleasures of his life by enabling him to satisfy, at a small expense, without emptying his purse or too greatly curtailing his patient observations, one of the wilder longings of his youth, from which he was not always exempted by age:To travel the world, by land and sea, from pole to pole; to cross-question life, under every clime, in the infinite variety of its manifestations: that surely would be glorious luck for him that has eyes to see; and it formed the radiant dream of my young years, at the time whenRobinson Crusoewas my delight. These rosy illusions, rich in voyages, were soon succeeded by dull, stay-at-home reality. The jungles of India, the virgin forests of Brazil, the towering crests of the Andes, beloved by the condor, were reduced, as a field for exploration, to a patch of pebbles enclosed within four walls.Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does not necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau herborised with the bunch of chick-weed whereon he fed his canary; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre discovered a world on a strawberry plant that grew by accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre, using an armchair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most famous of journeys around his room.[290]This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the bushes. I go the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a hundred times, by short stages; I stop here and I stop there; patiently I put questions and, at long intervals, I receive some scrap of a reply.The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis perches; each bush where the pale Italian Cricket strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the Leaf-cutter.If cruising among the nooks and corners of the garden do not suffice, a longer voyage shows ample profit. I double the cape of the neighbouring hedges and, at a few hundred yards, enter into relations with the Sacred Beetle, the Capricorn, the Geotrupes, the Copris, the Decticus, the Cricket, the Green Grasshopper, in short with a host of tribes the telling of whose story would exhaust a lifetime. Certainly, I have enough and even too much to do with my near neighbours, without leaving home to rove in distant lands.Nevertheless, it were well to compare what happens under our eyes with that which happens elsewhere; it were excellent to see how, in the same guild of workers, the fundamental instinct varies with climatic conditions.Then my longing to travel returns, vainer to-day than ever, unless one could find a seat on that carpet[291]of which we read in theArabian Nights, the famous carpet whereon one had but to sit to be carried whithersoever he pleased. O marvellous conveyance, far preferable to Xavier de Maistre’s post-chaise! If I could only find just a little corner on it, with a return-ticket!I do find it. I owe this unexpected good fortune to a Brother of the Christian Schools, to Brother Judulien, of the La Salle College at Buenos Aires. His modesty would be offended by the praises which his debtor owes him. Let us simply say that, acting on my instructions, his eyes take the place of mine. He seeks, finds, observes, sends me his notes and his discoveries. I observe, seek and find with him, by correspondence.It is done; thanks to this first-rate collaborator, I have my seat on the magic carpet. Behold me in the pampas of the Argentine Republic, eager to draw a parallel between the industry of the Sérignan Dung-beetles and that of their rivals in the western hemisphere.11To close the history of the Sérignan hermit by opening such remote perspectives is not so inconsistent as it may seem, for, after having obstinately imprisoned himself within the narrow horizon of his village all his life, the Provençal recluse was beginning to be[292]drawn out of it by the intelligent zeal of certain friends, who forced him to make a triumphant tour of France, and we might almost say of the world.The magic carpet on which they made him sit for this magnificent journey was, however, by no means a borrowed article. It was he himself who had provided it. It was none other than the marvellous series, so rich and so varied, of his entomological works, which had only to be known in order to ensure for the author everywhere the welcome which he deserved, a truly enthusiastic welcome, and the place which was due to him: one of the foremost places among our scientists and our writers.[293]1Souvenirs,X., pp. 102–109.↑2Souvenirs,II., pp. 1 to 19.↑3Ibid., p. 104.↑4Souvenirs,III., pp. 12–14.↑5Souvenirs,IV., pp. 59–60.↑6Darwin died at Down, in Kent, on the 19th of April, 1882.—A. T. de M.↑7Souvenirs,II., p. 99.↑8Souvenirs,II., p. 160. He makes this declaration in respect of an error which he had incorrectly attributed to Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin, on the faith of an unfaithful translation due to the entomologist Lacordaire. The mistake, which is really Lacordaire’s, not Erasmus Darwin’s, consisted in confusing the Sphex with a common Wasp. Charles Darwin, having informed Fabre that his grandfather had said “awasp,” the French naturalist immediately inserted this correction in a note, in the second volume of theSouvenirs, which I had not yet come across when I cited the passage in question. I can therefore say with M. Fabre: “May this note amend, within the proper limits, the assertions which I made in all good faith.”↑9Darwin died in 1882, and the second volume of theSouvenirsappeared in 1883.↑10Souvenirs,I., pp. 188, 189;II., pp. 103;VI., pp. 25, 166, 203;VII., pp. 8, 9, 57, 161, etc.↑11Souvenirs,VI., p. 70.The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. ix., “Dung-beetles of the Pampas.” There is also mention of Brother Judulien in a long note in vol.V., p. 131;The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, p. 238.↑

CHAPTER XVIIITHE COLLABORATORS: (CONTINUED)

Not all the naturalist’s experiments are dedicated to practical folk; some are reserved rather for the intellectual. Let us proceed to the facts:To-day is Shrove Tuesday, a reminiscence of the ancient Saturnalia. I am meditating, on this occasion, a fantastic dish which would have delighted the gourmets of Rome.…There will be eight of us; first of all my family, and then two friends, probably the only persons in the village before whom I could permit myself such eccentricities of diet without jocular comment upon what would be regarded as a depraved mania.One of these is the schoolmaster. Since he permits it and does not fear the comments of the foolish, if by chance the secret of our feast should be divulged, we will call him by his name, Jullian. A man of broad views and reared upon science, his mind is open to truth of every kind.The second, Marius Guigne, is a blind man who, a carpenter by profession, handles his plane and saw in the blackest darkness with the same[275]sureness of hand as that of a skilful-sighted person in broad daylight. He lost his sight in his youth, after he had known the joys of light and the wonders of colour. As a compensation for perpetual darkness he has acquired a gentle philosophy, always smiling; an ardent desire to fill, as far as possible, the gaps in his meagre primary education; a sensitiveness of hearing able to seize the subtle delicacies of music; and a fineness of touch most extraordinary in fingers calloused by the labours of the workshop. During our conversations, if he wishes to be informed as to this or that geometrical property, he holds out his widely-opened hand. This is our blackboard. With the tip of my forefinger, I trace on it the figure to be constructed; accompanying my light touches with a brief explanation. This is enough; the idea is grasped, and the saw, plane, and lathe will translate it into reality.On Sunday afternoons, in winter especially, when three logs flaming on the hearth form a delicious contrast to the brutalities of the Mistral, they meet in my house. The three of us form the village Athenæum, the Rural Institute, where we speak of everything except hateful politics.… At such a meeting, the delight of my solitude, to-day’s dinner was devised. The special dish consists of thecossus, a delicacy of great renown in ancient times.When he had eaten a sufficient number of nations, the Roman, brutalised by excess of luxury, began to eat worms. Pliny tells us: “Romanis in hoc luxuria esse cœpit, prægrandesque roborum[276]vermes delicatiore sunt in cibo: Cossos vocant.” (The Romans have reached such a degree of luxury at the table that they esteem as delicious tit-bits the great worm from the oak-tree known as Cossus.)I do not know with what sauce the Cossus was eaten in the days of the Cæsars, the Apicius of the period having left us no information on this point. Ortolans are roasted on a spit; it would be profaning them to add the relish of complicated preparation. Let us proceed in the same manner with the Cossus, these Ortolans of entomology. Spitted in rows, they are exposed on the grill to the heat of live embers. A pinch of salt, the necessary condiment of our dish, is the only addition made to it. The roast grows golden, softly sizzling, weeps a few oily tears which catch fire on contact with the coals and burn with a white flame. It is done! Let us serve it hot.Encouraged by my example, my family bravely attack their roast. The schoolmaster hesitates, the dupe of his imagination, which sees the great grubs of a little while ago crawling across his plate. He has taken for himself the smaller specimens, as the recollection of these disturbs him less. Less subject to imaginary dislikes, the blind man ruminates and savours them with every sign of satisfaction.The testimony is unanimous. The roast is juicy, tender, and extremely tasty. One recognises in it a certain flavour of burnt almonds which is enhanced by a vague aroma of vanilla. In short,[277]the vermicular dish is found to be highly acceptable, one might even say excellent. What would it be if the refined art of the gourmets of antiquity had cooked it!…If I have made this investigation it was certainly not in the hope of enriching the bill of fare. The rarity of the great grubs and the repugnance which all kinds of vermin arouses in most of us will always stand in the way of my discovery becoming a common dish.…As far as I am concerned, it was still less the desire for a dainty mouthful that actuated me. My sobriety is not easily tempted. A handful of cherries pleases me better than the preparations of our kitchens. My only desire was to elucidate a point of natural history.1I certainly admire this zeal for science and this absence of prejudice even in the choice of food; yet I am tempted to remark that in the matter of intrepidity, whether in respect of food or of science, there is one of Fabre’s circle of acquaintances who surpassed the schoolmaster and perhaps equals Fabre himself. I am referring to Favier. Who, then, is Favier?Favier is an old soldier. He has pitched his hut of clay and branches under the African carob-trees;[278]he has eaten sea-urchins at Constantinople; he has shot starlings in the Crimea, during a lull in the firing. He has seen much and remembered much. In winter, when work in the fields ends at four o’clock and the evenings are long, he puts away rake, fork, and barrow, and comes and sits on the hearth-stone of the kitchen fireplace, where the billets of ilex-wood blaze merrily. He fetches out his pipe, fills it methodically with a moistened thumb and smokes it solemnly. He has been thinking of it for many a long hour; but he has abstained, for tobacco is expensive. The privation has doubled the charm; and not one of the puffs recurring at regular intervals is wasted.Meanwhile, we start talking. Favier is, in his fashion, one of those bards of old who were given the best seat at the hearth, for the sake of their tales; only my story-teller was formed in the barrack-room. No matter: the whole household, large and small, listen to him with interest; though his speech is full of vivid images, it is always decent. It would be a great disappointment to us if he did not come, when his work was done, to take his ease in the chimney-corner.What does he talk about to make him so popular? He tells us what he saw of thecoup d’Etatto which we owe the hated Empire; he talks of the brandy served out and of the firing into the mob. He—so he assures me—always aimed at the wall; and I accept his word for it, so distressed does he appear to me and so ashamed of having taken a hand, however innocent, in that felon’s game.[279]He tells us of his watches in the trenches before Sebastopol; he speaks of his sudden terror when, at night, all alone on outpost duty, squatting in the snow, he saw fall beside him what he calls a flower-pot. It blazed and flared and shone and lit up everything around. The infernal machine threatened to burst at every second; and our man gave himself up for lost. But nothing happened: the flower-pot went out quietly. It was a star-shell, an illuminating contrivance fired to reconnoitre the assailant’s outworks in the dark.The tragedy of the battle-field is followed by the comedy of the barracks. He lets us into the mysteries of the stew-pan, the secrets of the mess, the humorous hardships of the cells. And, as his stock of anecdotes, seasoned with racy expressions, is inexhaustible, the supper hour arrives before any of us has had time to remark how long the evening is.Favier first attracted my notice by a master-stroke. One of my friends had sent me from Marseilles a pair of enormous Crabs, the Maia, the Sea-spider or Spider-crab of the fishermen. I was unpacking the captives when the workmen returned from their dinner: painters, stone-masons, plasterers engaged in repairing the house which had been empty so long. At the sight of those strange animals, studded with spikes all over the carapace and perched on long legs that give them a certain resemblance to a monstrous Spider, the onlookers gave a cry of surprise, almost of alarm. Favier, for his part, remained unmoved; and, as he skilfully[280]seized the terrible Spider struggling to get away, he said:“I know that thing; I’ve eaten it at Vasna. It’s first-rate.”And he looked round at the bystanders with an air of humorous mockery which was meant to convey:“You’ve never been out of your hole, you people.”Favier knows many things; and he knows them more particularly through having eaten them. He knows the virtues of a Badger’s back, the toothsome qualities of the leg of a Fox; he is an expert as to the best part of that Eel of the bushes, the Snake; he has browned in oil the Eyed Lizard, the ill-famedRassadeof the South; he has thought out the recipe of a fry of Locusts. I am astounded at the impossible stews which he has concocted during his cosmopolitan career.I am no less surprised at his penetrating eye and his memory for things. I have only to describe some plant, which to him is but a nameless weed, devoid of the least interest; and, if it grows in our woods, I feel pretty sure that he will bring it to me and tell me the spot where I can pick it for myself. The botany of the infinitesimal even does not foil his perspicacity.But, above all, he excels in ridding me of the troublesome folk whom I meet upon my rambles. The peasant is naturally curious, as fond of asking questions as a child; but his curiosity is flavoured with a spice of malice and in all his questions there[281]is an undercurrent of chaff. What he fails to understand he turns into ridicule. And what can be more ludicrous than a gentleman looking through a glass at a Fly captured with a gauze net, or a bit of rotten wood picked up from the ground? Favier cuts short the bantering catechism with a word.2Favier has other qualities: he does not hesitate in the face of difficulties, and it is a point of honour with him to acquit himself manfully, however arduous the task.Favier is not content with faithfully executing his master’s orders. Like all intelligent and devoted servants, he divines and anticipates his desires. He has happy ideas of initiative.On the 14th of April 1880, Favier was clearing away a heap of mould resulting from the waste weeds and leaves heaped up in a corner against the enclosing wall.… In the midst of his work with spade and wheelbarrow, he suddenly called me:“A find, sir, a splendid find! Come and look!”I hurried up. There, indeed, was a splendid discovery, and of a kind to fill me with delight, reawakening all my old memories of the Bois des Issarts.3[282]There swarmed a whole population of Scarabæi, in the form of larvæ, nymphs, and adult insects. There, too, were crowds of Rose-beetles (Cetoniæ), all stages being represented. There, too, were great numbers of Scoliæ, the Two-striped Scoliæ having recently emerged from their cocoons, which still had beside them the skins of the game served to the larvæ; and there, before the naturalist’s eyes, was the solution of the problem of the Scolia’s food, which “his painful researches in the Bois des Issarts had not enabled him to solve.”4Less than this had been needed for Favier to merit mention in the order of the day!At the beginning of this chapter should we not have placed the insects themselves at the head of Fabre’s collaborators in his researches? When the insect takes a hand, Favier himself is out of the running.In the meantime we have no intention of belittling Favier, or of retracting the praise which has been lavished upon him. Despite his inevitable deficiencies, and sometimes even because of them, Fabre owes him much. He owes him important manual services; he owes him curious data and inestimable discoveries; lastly, he owes him hitherto unknown opinions[283]relating to evolution, for Favier is an evolutionist, and a highly original one.For him the bat is a rat that has grown wings; the cuckoo is a sparrow-hawk that has retired from business; the slug, a snail which, through advancing age, has lost its shell; the night-jar, theetraoucho-grepaou, as he calls it, is an old toad which, having developed a passion for milk, has grown feathers in order to enter the folds and milk the goats. It would be impossible to get these fantastic ideas out of his head. Favier is, as will be seen, an evolutionist after his fashion, and a daring evolutionist. Nothing gives him pause in tracing the descent of animals. He has a reply for everything: this comes from that. If you ask why, he replies: “See how like they are!”Shall we reproach him for these insanities when we hear scientists acclaiming the pithecanthropos as the precursor of man, led astray as they are by the formation of the monkey? Shall we reject the metamorphoses of thechavucho-grapaouwhen there are men who will seriously tell us that in the present condition of science it is absolutely proved that man is descended from some vaguely sketched monkey? Of the two transformations Favier’s seems to me the more admissible. A painter, a friend of mine, the brother of the great musician, Félicien David, imparted to me one day his reflections concerning the human structure. “Vé, moun bel ami,” he said, “vé: l’homé a lou dintré d’un por et[284]loudéforo d’uno mounino” (Man has the inside of a pig and the outside of a monkey). I recommend the painter’s jest to those who wish to derive man from the wild boar, when the monkey is out of fashion. According to David the descent is confirmed by internal resemblances: “L’homé a lou dintré d’un por.”And, therefore, the naturalist proceeds to make some wise reflections which we owe in the first place to Favier:Let us avoid generalisations that are not founded upon sufficiently numerous and solid foundations. Where these foundations are lacking the child is the great generaliser.For him the feathered race means just the bird, and the reptile family the snake, without other differences than those of magnitude. Ignorant of everything, he generalises to the utmost, simplifying in his inability to see the complex. Later on he will learn that the Sparrow is not the Bullfinch, that the Linnet is not the Greenfinch; he will particularise, and he will do so more and more daily as his faculty of observation is more widely exercised. At first he saw nothing but resemblances, now he sees differences, but not yet so clearly as to avoid incongruous comparisons and zoological solecisms like those which my gardener utters.5[285]This chapter was to have taken the form of a letter addressed to Charles Darwin, the illustrious naturalist who now lies buried beside Newton in Westminster Abbey. It was my task to report to him the result of some experiments which he had suggested to me in the course of our correspondence: a very pleasant task, for, though facts, as I see them, disincline me to accept his theories, I have none the less the deepest veneration for his noble character and his scientific honesty. I was drafting my letter when the sad news reached me: Darwin was dead:6after searching the mighty question of origins, he was now grappling with the last and darkest problem of the hereafter.7This is what we need at the head of the seventh chapter of the second volume of theSouvenirs. Especially coming after what has gone before them, these few lines shed a more brilliant light upon Fabre’s secret attitude toward those very thinkers whose ideas he opposes most keenly than could any number of lectures. We have here the practical exemplification of that beautiful profession of faith inspired by Saint Augustine, which he has recorded elsewhere: “I wage war boldly upon those ideas that I believe untrue:[286]but God preserve me from ever doing so upon those who maintain them.”8In his constant skirmishes against the theory of evolution, even in the set battles which he occasionally fights, whenever he writes Charles Darwin’s name he mentions it with evident accents of respect and sympathy, gladly referring to him as “the master,” “the illustrious master,” “the venerated master.”On his part the English scientist does full justice to the French scientist’s incomparable mastery in the study of insects. We have often mentioned the title of “inimitable observer” which he gives him in his work on theOrigin of Species. In a letter dated the 16th of April 1881, he wrote to Mr. Romanes, who was preparing a book onAnimal Intelligence: “I do not know whether you[287]would care to discuss in your book some of the more complicated and marvellous instincts. It is an ungrateful task.… But if you discuss some of these instincts, it seems to me that you could not take a more interesting point than that of the animals that paralyse their prey, as Fabre has described in his astonishing memoir in theAnnales des sciences naturelles, a memoir which he has since amplified in his admirableSouvenirs.”When he wrote this Darwin was acquainted only with the first volume of theSouvenirs.9What would he have said if he could have enjoyed the whole of the learned entomologist’s masterly work?In reading this first volume, the attention of the English naturalist had been especially struck by the operations of the Hunting Wasps, which were peculiarly upsetting to his theories.Darwin was visibly preoccupied by the problem of instinct as propounded by the irrefutable observations of the French entomologist, but he did not despair of finding a solution in conformity with his system. Fabre, on his side, believed that his position[288]was inexpugnable, and was not without hope of converting Darwin by what appeared to him to be the evidence of the facts.Nowhere does the theory of evolution come full tilt against so immovable an obstacle. Darwin, a true judge, did not fail to realise this. He greatly dreaded the problem of the instincts. My first results in particular had left him anxious. If he had known the tactics of the Hairy Ammophila, the Mantis-hunting Tachytus, the Philanthus apivorus, the Calicurgus, and other predatory insects which have since been investigated, his anxiety, I believe, would have become a frank avowal of his inability to get instinct to enter the world of his formula. Alas! the philosopher of Down left us when the discussion was only just beginning, with experiment to fall back upon, a method superior to all arguments. The little that I had published at that period left him still some hope of explanation. In his eyes instinct is always an acquired habit.We have already mentioned Fabre’s relations with Moquin-Tandon, Dufour, Pasteur, and Duruy. Other names might be added to complete the list of his friends, or the correspondents whom he succeeded in interesting in entomology and admitting more or less to participation in his researches.10We[289]will confine ourselves here to mentioning a worthy Brother of the Christian Colleges who afforded him one of the great pleasures of his life by enabling him to satisfy, at a small expense, without emptying his purse or too greatly curtailing his patient observations, one of the wilder longings of his youth, from which he was not always exempted by age:To travel the world, by land and sea, from pole to pole; to cross-question life, under every clime, in the infinite variety of its manifestations: that surely would be glorious luck for him that has eyes to see; and it formed the radiant dream of my young years, at the time whenRobinson Crusoewas my delight. These rosy illusions, rich in voyages, were soon succeeded by dull, stay-at-home reality. The jungles of India, the virgin forests of Brazil, the towering crests of the Andes, beloved by the condor, were reduced, as a field for exploration, to a patch of pebbles enclosed within four walls.Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does not necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau herborised with the bunch of chick-weed whereon he fed his canary; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre discovered a world on a strawberry plant that grew by accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre, using an armchair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most famous of journeys around his room.[290]This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the bushes. I go the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a hundred times, by short stages; I stop here and I stop there; patiently I put questions and, at long intervals, I receive some scrap of a reply.The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis perches; each bush where the pale Italian Cricket strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the Leaf-cutter.If cruising among the nooks and corners of the garden do not suffice, a longer voyage shows ample profit. I double the cape of the neighbouring hedges and, at a few hundred yards, enter into relations with the Sacred Beetle, the Capricorn, the Geotrupes, the Copris, the Decticus, the Cricket, the Green Grasshopper, in short with a host of tribes the telling of whose story would exhaust a lifetime. Certainly, I have enough and even too much to do with my near neighbours, without leaving home to rove in distant lands.Nevertheless, it were well to compare what happens under our eyes with that which happens elsewhere; it were excellent to see how, in the same guild of workers, the fundamental instinct varies with climatic conditions.Then my longing to travel returns, vainer to-day than ever, unless one could find a seat on that carpet[291]of which we read in theArabian Nights, the famous carpet whereon one had but to sit to be carried whithersoever he pleased. O marvellous conveyance, far preferable to Xavier de Maistre’s post-chaise! If I could only find just a little corner on it, with a return-ticket!I do find it. I owe this unexpected good fortune to a Brother of the Christian Schools, to Brother Judulien, of the La Salle College at Buenos Aires. His modesty would be offended by the praises which his debtor owes him. Let us simply say that, acting on my instructions, his eyes take the place of mine. He seeks, finds, observes, sends me his notes and his discoveries. I observe, seek and find with him, by correspondence.It is done; thanks to this first-rate collaborator, I have my seat on the magic carpet. Behold me in the pampas of the Argentine Republic, eager to draw a parallel between the industry of the Sérignan Dung-beetles and that of their rivals in the western hemisphere.11To close the history of the Sérignan hermit by opening such remote perspectives is not so inconsistent as it may seem, for, after having obstinately imprisoned himself within the narrow horizon of his village all his life, the Provençal recluse was beginning to be[292]drawn out of it by the intelligent zeal of certain friends, who forced him to make a triumphant tour of France, and we might almost say of the world.The magic carpet on which they made him sit for this magnificent journey was, however, by no means a borrowed article. It was he himself who had provided it. It was none other than the marvellous series, so rich and so varied, of his entomological works, which had only to be known in order to ensure for the author everywhere the welcome which he deserved, a truly enthusiastic welcome, and the place which was due to him: one of the foremost places among our scientists and our writers.[293]

Not all the naturalist’s experiments are dedicated to practical folk; some are reserved rather for the intellectual. Let us proceed to the facts:

To-day is Shrove Tuesday, a reminiscence of the ancient Saturnalia. I am meditating, on this occasion, a fantastic dish which would have delighted the gourmets of Rome.…There will be eight of us; first of all my family, and then two friends, probably the only persons in the village before whom I could permit myself such eccentricities of diet without jocular comment upon what would be regarded as a depraved mania.One of these is the schoolmaster. Since he permits it and does not fear the comments of the foolish, if by chance the secret of our feast should be divulged, we will call him by his name, Jullian. A man of broad views and reared upon science, his mind is open to truth of every kind.The second, Marius Guigne, is a blind man who, a carpenter by profession, handles his plane and saw in the blackest darkness with the same[275]sureness of hand as that of a skilful-sighted person in broad daylight. He lost his sight in his youth, after he had known the joys of light and the wonders of colour. As a compensation for perpetual darkness he has acquired a gentle philosophy, always smiling; an ardent desire to fill, as far as possible, the gaps in his meagre primary education; a sensitiveness of hearing able to seize the subtle delicacies of music; and a fineness of touch most extraordinary in fingers calloused by the labours of the workshop. During our conversations, if he wishes to be informed as to this or that geometrical property, he holds out his widely-opened hand. This is our blackboard. With the tip of my forefinger, I trace on it the figure to be constructed; accompanying my light touches with a brief explanation. This is enough; the idea is grasped, and the saw, plane, and lathe will translate it into reality.On Sunday afternoons, in winter especially, when three logs flaming on the hearth form a delicious contrast to the brutalities of the Mistral, they meet in my house. The three of us form the village Athenæum, the Rural Institute, where we speak of everything except hateful politics.… At such a meeting, the delight of my solitude, to-day’s dinner was devised. The special dish consists of thecossus, a delicacy of great renown in ancient times.When he had eaten a sufficient number of nations, the Roman, brutalised by excess of luxury, began to eat worms. Pliny tells us: “Romanis in hoc luxuria esse cœpit, prægrandesque roborum[276]vermes delicatiore sunt in cibo: Cossos vocant.” (The Romans have reached such a degree of luxury at the table that they esteem as delicious tit-bits the great worm from the oak-tree known as Cossus.)I do not know with what sauce the Cossus was eaten in the days of the Cæsars, the Apicius of the period having left us no information on this point. Ortolans are roasted on a spit; it would be profaning them to add the relish of complicated preparation. Let us proceed in the same manner with the Cossus, these Ortolans of entomology. Spitted in rows, they are exposed on the grill to the heat of live embers. A pinch of salt, the necessary condiment of our dish, is the only addition made to it. The roast grows golden, softly sizzling, weeps a few oily tears which catch fire on contact with the coals and burn with a white flame. It is done! Let us serve it hot.Encouraged by my example, my family bravely attack their roast. The schoolmaster hesitates, the dupe of his imagination, which sees the great grubs of a little while ago crawling across his plate. He has taken for himself the smaller specimens, as the recollection of these disturbs him less. Less subject to imaginary dislikes, the blind man ruminates and savours them with every sign of satisfaction.The testimony is unanimous. The roast is juicy, tender, and extremely tasty. One recognises in it a certain flavour of burnt almonds which is enhanced by a vague aroma of vanilla. In short,[277]the vermicular dish is found to be highly acceptable, one might even say excellent. What would it be if the refined art of the gourmets of antiquity had cooked it!…If I have made this investigation it was certainly not in the hope of enriching the bill of fare. The rarity of the great grubs and the repugnance which all kinds of vermin arouses in most of us will always stand in the way of my discovery becoming a common dish.…As far as I am concerned, it was still less the desire for a dainty mouthful that actuated me. My sobriety is not easily tempted. A handful of cherries pleases me better than the preparations of our kitchens. My only desire was to elucidate a point of natural history.1

To-day is Shrove Tuesday, a reminiscence of the ancient Saturnalia. I am meditating, on this occasion, a fantastic dish which would have delighted the gourmets of Rome.…

There will be eight of us; first of all my family, and then two friends, probably the only persons in the village before whom I could permit myself such eccentricities of diet without jocular comment upon what would be regarded as a depraved mania.

One of these is the schoolmaster. Since he permits it and does not fear the comments of the foolish, if by chance the secret of our feast should be divulged, we will call him by his name, Jullian. A man of broad views and reared upon science, his mind is open to truth of every kind.

The second, Marius Guigne, is a blind man who, a carpenter by profession, handles his plane and saw in the blackest darkness with the same[275]sureness of hand as that of a skilful-sighted person in broad daylight. He lost his sight in his youth, after he had known the joys of light and the wonders of colour. As a compensation for perpetual darkness he has acquired a gentle philosophy, always smiling; an ardent desire to fill, as far as possible, the gaps in his meagre primary education; a sensitiveness of hearing able to seize the subtle delicacies of music; and a fineness of touch most extraordinary in fingers calloused by the labours of the workshop. During our conversations, if he wishes to be informed as to this or that geometrical property, he holds out his widely-opened hand. This is our blackboard. With the tip of my forefinger, I trace on it the figure to be constructed; accompanying my light touches with a brief explanation. This is enough; the idea is grasped, and the saw, plane, and lathe will translate it into reality.

On Sunday afternoons, in winter especially, when three logs flaming on the hearth form a delicious contrast to the brutalities of the Mistral, they meet in my house. The three of us form the village Athenæum, the Rural Institute, where we speak of everything except hateful politics.… At such a meeting, the delight of my solitude, to-day’s dinner was devised. The special dish consists of thecossus, a delicacy of great renown in ancient times.

When he had eaten a sufficient number of nations, the Roman, brutalised by excess of luxury, began to eat worms. Pliny tells us: “Romanis in hoc luxuria esse cœpit, prægrandesque roborum[276]vermes delicatiore sunt in cibo: Cossos vocant.” (The Romans have reached such a degree of luxury at the table that they esteem as delicious tit-bits the great worm from the oak-tree known as Cossus.)

I do not know with what sauce the Cossus was eaten in the days of the Cæsars, the Apicius of the period having left us no information on this point. Ortolans are roasted on a spit; it would be profaning them to add the relish of complicated preparation. Let us proceed in the same manner with the Cossus, these Ortolans of entomology. Spitted in rows, they are exposed on the grill to the heat of live embers. A pinch of salt, the necessary condiment of our dish, is the only addition made to it. The roast grows golden, softly sizzling, weeps a few oily tears which catch fire on contact with the coals and burn with a white flame. It is done! Let us serve it hot.

Encouraged by my example, my family bravely attack their roast. The schoolmaster hesitates, the dupe of his imagination, which sees the great grubs of a little while ago crawling across his plate. He has taken for himself the smaller specimens, as the recollection of these disturbs him less. Less subject to imaginary dislikes, the blind man ruminates and savours them with every sign of satisfaction.

The testimony is unanimous. The roast is juicy, tender, and extremely tasty. One recognises in it a certain flavour of burnt almonds which is enhanced by a vague aroma of vanilla. In short,[277]the vermicular dish is found to be highly acceptable, one might even say excellent. What would it be if the refined art of the gourmets of antiquity had cooked it!…

If I have made this investigation it was certainly not in the hope of enriching the bill of fare. The rarity of the great grubs and the repugnance which all kinds of vermin arouses in most of us will always stand in the way of my discovery becoming a common dish.…

As far as I am concerned, it was still less the desire for a dainty mouthful that actuated me. My sobriety is not easily tempted. A handful of cherries pleases me better than the preparations of our kitchens. My only desire was to elucidate a point of natural history.1

I certainly admire this zeal for science and this absence of prejudice even in the choice of food; yet I am tempted to remark that in the matter of intrepidity, whether in respect of food or of science, there is one of Fabre’s circle of acquaintances who surpassed the schoolmaster and perhaps equals Fabre himself. I am referring to Favier. Who, then, is Favier?

Favier is an old soldier. He has pitched his hut of clay and branches under the African carob-trees;[278]he has eaten sea-urchins at Constantinople; he has shot starlings in the Crimea, during a lull in the firing. He has seen much and remembered much. In winter, when work in the fields ends at four o’clock and the evenings are long, he puts away rake, fork, and barrow, and comes and sits on the hearth-stone of the kitchen fireplace, where the billets of ilex-wood blaze merrily. He fetches out his pipe, fills it methodically with a moistened thumb and smokes it solemnly. He has been thinking of it for many a long hour; but he has abstained, for tobacco is expensive. The privation has doubled the charm; and not one of the puffs recurring at regular intervals is wasted.Meanwhile, we start talking. Favier is, in his fashion, one of those bards of old who were given the best seat at the hearth, for the sake of their tales; only my story-teller was formed in the barrack-room. No matter: the whole household, large and small, listen to him with interest; though his speech is full of vivid images, it is always decent. It would be a great disappointment to us if he did not come, when his work was done, to take his ease in the chimney-corner.What does he talk about to make him so popular? He tells us what he saw of thecoup d’Etatto which we owe the hated Empire; he talks of the brandy served out and of the firing into the mob. He—so he assures me—always aimed at the wall; and I accept his word for it, so distressed does he appear to me and so ashamed of having taken a hand, however innocent, in that felon’s game.[279]He tells us of his watches in the trenches before Sebastopol; he speaks of his sudden terror when, at night, all alone on outpost duty, squatting in the snow, he saw fall beside him what he calls a flower-pot. It blazed and flared and shone and lit up everything around. The infernal machine threatened to burst at every second; and our man gave himself up for lost. But nothing happened: the flower-pot went out quietly. It was a star-shell, an illuminating contrivance fired to reconnoitre the assailant’s outworks in the dark.The tragedy of the battle-field is followed by the comedy of the barracks. He lets us into the mysteries of the stew-pan, the secrets of the mess, the humorous hardships of the cells. And, as his stock of anecdotes, seasoned with racy expressions, is inexhaustible, the supper hour arrives before any of us has had time to remark how long the evening is.Favier first attracted my notice by a master-stroke. One of my friends had sent me from Marseilles a pair of enormous Crabs, the Maia, the Sea-spider or Spider-crab of the fishermen. I was unpacking the captives when the workmen returned from their dinner: painters, stone-masons, plasterers engaged in repairing the house which had been empty so long. At the sight of those strange animals, studded with spikes all over the carapace and perched on long legs that give them a certain resemblance to a monstrous Spider, the onlookers gave a cry of surprise, almost of alarm. Favier, for his part, remained unmoved; and, as he skilfully[280]seized the terrible Spider struggling to get away, he said:“I know that thing; I’ve eaten it at Vasna. It’s first-rate.”And he looked round at the bystanders with an air of humorous mockery which was meant to convey:“You’ve never been out of your hole, you people.”Favier knows many things; and he knows them more particularly through having eaten them. He knows the virtues of a Badger’s back, the toothsome qualities of the leg of a Fox; he is an expert as to the best part of that Eel of the bushes, the Snake; he has browned in oil the Eyed Lizard, the ill-famedRassadeof the South; he has thought out the recipe of a fry of Locusts. I am astounded at the impossible stews which he has concocted during his cosmopolitan career.I am no less surprised at his penetrating eye and his memory for things. I have only to describe some plant, which to him is but a nameless weed, devoid of the least interest; and, if it grows in our woods, I feel pretty sure that he will bring it to me and tell me the spot where I can pick it for myself. The botany of the infinitesimal even does not foil his perspicacity.But, above all, he excels in ridding me of the troublesome folk whom I meet upon my rambles. The peasant is naturally curious, as fond of asking questions as a child; but his curiosity is flavoured with a spice of malice and in all his questions there[281]is an undercurrent of chaff. What he fails to understand he turns into ridicule. And what can be more ludicrous than a gentleman looking through a glass at a Fly captured with a gauze net, or a bit of rotten wood picked up from the ground? Favier cuts short the bantering catechism with a word.2

Meanwhile, we start talking. Favier is, in his fashion, one of those bards of old who were given the best seat at the hearth, for the sake of their tales; only my story-teller was formed in the barrack-room. No matter: the whole household, large and small, listen to him with interest; though his speech is full of vivid images, it is always decent. It would be a great disappointment to us if he did not come, when his work was done, to take his ease in the chimney-corner.

What does he talk about to make him so popular? He tells us what he saw of thecoup d’Etatto which we owe the hated Empire; he talks of the brandy served out and of the firing into the mob. He—so he assures me—always aimed at the wall; and I accept his word for it, so distressed does he appear to me and so ashamed of having taken a hand, however innocent, in that felon’s game.[279]

He tells us of his watches in the trenches before Sebastopol; he speaks of his sudden terror when, at night, all alone on outpost duty, squatting in the snow, he saw fall beside him what he calls a flower-pot. It blazed and flared and shone and lit up everything around. The infernal machine threatened to burst at every second; and our man gave himself up for lost. But nothing happened: the flower-pot went out quietly. It was a star-shell, an illuminating contrivance fired to reconnoitre the assailant’s outworks in the dark.

The tragedy of the battle-field is followed by the comedy of the barracks. He lets us into the mysteries of the stew-pan, the secrets of the mess, the humorous hardships of the cells. And, as his stock of anecdotes, seasoned with racy expressions, is inexhaustible, the supper hour arrives before any of us has had time to remark how long the evening is.

Favier first attracted my notice by a master-stroke. One of my friends had sent me from Marseilles a pair of enormous Crabs, the Maia, the Sea-spider or Spider-crab of the fishermen. I was unpacking the captives when the workmen returned from their dinner: painters, stone-masons, plasterers engaged in repairing the house which had been empty so long. At the sight of those strange animals, studded with spikes all over the carapace and perched on long legs that give them a certain resemblance to a monstrous Spider, the onlookers gave a cry of surprise, almost of alarm. Favier, for his part, remained unmoved; and, as he skilfully[280]seized the terrible Spider struggling to get away, he said:

“I know that thing; I’ve eaten it at Vasna. It’s first-rate.”

And he looked round at the bystanders with an air of humorous mockery which was meant to convey:

“You’ve never been out of your hole, you people.”

Favier knows many things; and he knows them more particularly through having eaten them. He knows the virtues of a Badger’s back, the toothsome qualities of the leg of a Fox; he is an expert as to the best part of that Eel of the bushes, the Snake; he has browned in oil the Eyed Lizard, the ill-famedRassadeof the South; he has thought out the recipe of a fry of Locusts. I am astounded at the impossible stews which he has concocted during his cosmopolitan career.

I am no less surprised at his penetrating eye and his memory for things. I have only to describe some plant, which to him is but a nameless weed, devoid of the least interest; and, if it grows in our woods, I feel pretty sure that he will bring it to me and tell me the spot where I can pick it for myself. The botany of the infinitesimal even does not foil his perspicacity.

But, above all, he excels in ridding me of the troublesome folk whom I meet upon my rambles. The peasant is naturally curious, as fond of asking questions as a child; but his curiosity is flavoured with a spice of malice and in all his questions there[281]is an undercurrent of chaff. What he fails to understand he turns into ridicule. And what can be more ludicrous than a gentleman looking through a glass at a Fly captured with a gauze net, or a bit of rotten wood picked up from the ground? Favier cuts short the bantering catechism with a word.2

Favier has other qualities: he does not hesitate in the face of difficulties, and it is a point of honour with him to acquit himself manfully, however arduous the task.

Favier is not content with faithfully executing his master’s orders. Like all intelligent and devoted servants, he divines and anticipates his desires. He has happy ideas of initiative.

On the 14th of April 1880, Favier was clearing away a heap of mould resulting from the waste weeds and leaves heaped up in a corner against the enclosing wall.… In the midst of his work with spade and wheelbarrow, he suddenly called me:“A find, sir, a splendid find! Come and look!”I hurried up. There, indeed, was a splendid discovery, and of a kind to fill me with delight, reawakening all my old memories of the Bois des Issarts.3

“A find, sir, a splendid find! Come and look!”

I hurried up. There, indeed, was a splendid discovery, and of a kind to fill me with delight, reawakening all my old memories of the Bois des Issarts.3

[282]

There swarmed a whole population of Scarabæi, in the form of larvæ, nymphs, and adult insects. There, too, were crowds of Rose-beetles (Cetoniæ), all stages being represented. There, too, were great numbers of Scoliæ, the Two-striped Scoliæ having recently emerged from their cocoons, which still had beside them the skins of the game served to the larvæ; and there, before the naturalist’s eyes, was the solution of the problem of the Scolia’s food, which “his painful researches in the Bois des Issarts had not enabled him to solve.”4Less than this had been needed for Favier to merit mention in the order of the day!

At the beginning of this chapter should we not have placed the insects themselves at the head of Fabre’s collaborators in his researches? When the insect takes a hand, Favier himself is out of the running.

In the meantime we have no intention of belittling Favier, or of retracting the praise which has been lavished upon him. Despite his inevitable deficiencies, and sometimes even because of them, Fabre owes him much. He owes him important manual services; he owes him curious data and inestimable discoveries; lastly, he owes him hitherto unknown opinions[283]relating to evolution, for Favier is an evolutionist, and a highly original one.

For him the bat is a rat that has grown wings; the cuckoo is a sparrow-hawk that has retired from business; the slug, a snail which, through advancing age, has lost its shell; the night-jar, theetraoucho-grepaou, as he calls it, is an old toad which, having developed a passion for milk, has grown feathers in order to enter the folds and milk the goats. It would be impossible to get these fantastic ideas out of his head. Favier is, as will be seen, an evolutionist after his fashion, and a daring evolutionist. Nothing gives him pause in tracing the descent of animals. He has a reply for everything: this comes from that. If you ask why, he replies: “See how like they are!”Shall we reproach him for these insanities when we hear scientists acclaiming the pithecanthropos as the precursor of man, led astray as they are by the formation of the monkey? Shall we reject the metamorphoses of thechavucho-grapaouwhen there are men who will seriously tell us that in the present condition of science it is absolutely proved that man is descended from some vaguely sketched monkey? Of the two transformations Favier’s seems to me the more admissible. A painter, a friend of mine, the brother of the great musician, Félicien David, imparted to me one day his reflections concerning the human structure. “Vé, moun bel ami,” he said, “vé: l’homé a lou dintré d’un por et[284]loudéforo d’uno mounino” (Man has the inside of a pig and the outside of a monkey). I recommend the painter’s jest to those who wish to derive man from the wild boar, when the monkey is out of fashion. According to David the descent is confirmed by internal resemblances: “L’homé a lou dintré d’un por.”

Shall we reproach him for these insanities when we hear scientists acclaiming the pithecanthropos as the precursor of man, led astray as they are by the formation of the monkey? Shall we reject the metamorphoses of thechavucho-grapaouwhen there are men who will seriously tell us that in the present condition of science it is absolutely proved that man is descended from some vaguely sketched monkey? Of the two transformations Favier’s seems to me the more admissible. A painter, a friend of mine, the brother of the great musician, Félicien David, imparted to me one day his reflections concerning the human structure. “Vé, moun bel ami,” he said, “vé: l’homé a lou dintré d’un por et[284]loudéforo d’uno mounino” (Man has the inside of a pig and the outside of a monkey). I recommend the painter’s jest to those who wish to derive man from the wild boar, when the monkey is out of fashion. According to David the descent is confirmed by internal resemblances: “L’homé a lou dintré d’un por.”

And, therefore, the naturalist proceeds to make some wise reflections which we owe in the first place to Favier:

Let us avoid generalisations that are not founded upon sufficiently numerous and solid foundations. Where these foundations are lacking the child is the great generaliser.For him the feathered race means just the bird, and the reptile family the snake, without other differences than those of magnitude. Ignorant of everything, he generalises to the utmost, simplifying in his inability to see the complex. Later on he will learn that the Sparrow is not the Bullfinch, that the Linnet is not the Greenfinch; he will particularise, and he will do so more and more daily as his faculty of observation is more widely exercised. At first he saw nothing but resemblances, now he sees differences, but not yet so clearly as to avoid incongruous comparisons and zoological solecisms like those which my gardener utters.5[285]This chapter was to have taken the form of a letter addressed to Charles Darwin, the illustrious naturalist who now lies buried beside Newton in Westminster Abbey. It was my task to report to him the result of some experiments which he had suggested to me in the course of our correspondence: a very pleasant task, for, though facts, as I see them, disincline me to accept his theories, I have none the less the deepest veneration for his noble character and his scientific honesty. I was drafting my letter when the sad news reached me: Darwin was dead:6after searching the mighty question of origins, he was now grappling with the last and darkest problem of the hereafter.7

Let us avoid generalisations that are not founded upon sufficiently numerous and solid foundations. Where these foundations are lacking the child is the great generaliser.

For him the feathered race means just the bird, and the reptile family the snake, without other differences than those of magnitude. Ignorant of everything, he generalises to the utmost, simplifying in his inability to see the complex. Later on he will learn that the Sparrow is not the Bullfinch, that the Linnet is not the Greenfinch; he will particularise, and he will do so more and more daily as his faculty of observation is more widely exercised. At first he saw nothing but resemblances, now he sees differences, but not yet so clearly as to avoid incongruous comparisons and zoological solecisms like those which my gardener utters.5[285]

This chapter was to have taken the form of a letter addressed to Charles Darwin, the illustrious naturalist who now lies buried beside Newton in Westminster Abbey. It was my task to report to him the result of some experiments which he had suggested to me in the course of our correspondence: a very pleasant task, for, though facts, as I see them, disincline me to accept his theories, I have none the less the deepest veneration for his noble character and his scientific honesty. I was drafting my letter when the sad news reached me: Darwin was dead:6after searching the mighty question of origins, he was now grappling with the last and darkest problem of the hereafter.7

This is what we need at the head of the seventh chapter of the second volume of theSouvenirs. Especially coming after what has gone before them, these few lines shed a more brilliant light upon Fabre’s secret attitude toward those very thinkers whose ideas he opposes most keenly than could any number of lectures. We have here the practical exemplification of that beautiful profession of faith inspired by Saint Augustine, which he has recorded elsewhere: “I wage war boldly upon those ideas that I believe untrue:[286]but God preserve me from ever doing so upon those who maintain them.”8

In his constant skirmishes against the theory of evolution, even in the set battles which he occasionally fights, whenever he writes Charles Darwin’s name he mentions it with evident accents of respect and sympathy, gladly referring to him as “the master,” “the illustrious master,” “the venerated master.”

On his part the English scientist does full justice to the French scientist’s incomparable mastery in the study of insects. We have often mentioned the title of “inimitable observer” which he gives him in his work on theOrigin of Species. In a letter dated the 16th of April 1881, he wrote to Mr. Romanes, who was preparing a book onAnimal Intelligence: “I do not know whether you[287]would care to discuss in your book some of the more complicated and marvellous instincts. It is an ungrateful task.… But if you discuss some of these instincts, it seems to me that you could not take a more interesting point than that of the animals that paralyse their prey, as Fabre has described in his astonishing memoir in theAnnales des sciences naturelles, a memoir which he has since amplified in his admirableSouvenirs.”

When he wrote this Darwin was acquainted only with the first volume of theSouvenirs.9What would he have said if he could have enjoyed the whole of the learned entomologist’s masterly work?

In reading this first volume, the attention of the English naturalist had been especially struck by the operations of the Hunting Wasps, which were peculiarly upsetting to his theories.

Darwin was visibly preoccupied by the problem of instinct as propounded by the irrefutable observations of the French entomologist, but he did not despair of finding a solution in conformity with his system. Fabre, on his side, believed that his position[288]was inexpugnable, and was not without hope of converting Darwin by what appeared to him to be the evidence of the facts.

Nowhere does the theory of evolution come full tilt against so immovable an obstacle. Darwin, a true judge, did not fail to realise this. He greatly dreaded the problem of the instincts. My first results in particular had left him anxious. If he had known the tactics of the Hairy Ammophila, the Mantis-hunting Tachytus, the Philanthus apivorus, the Calicurgus, and other predatory insects which have since been investigated, his anxiety, I believe, would have become a frank avowal of his inability to get instinct to enter the world of his formula. Alas! the philosopher of Down left us when the discussion was only just beginning, with experiment to fall back upon, a method superior to all arguments. The little that I had published at that period left him still some hope of explanation. In his eyes instinct is always an acquired habit.

We have already mentioned Fabre’s relations with Moquin-Tandon, Dufour, Pasteur, and Duruy. Other names might be added to complete the list of his friends, or the correspondents whom he succeeded in interesting in entomology and admitting more or less to participation in his researches.10We[289]will confine ourselves here to mentioning a worthy Brother of the Christian Colleges who afforded him one of the great pleasures of his life by enabling him to satisfy, at a small expense, without emptying his purse or too greatly curtailing his patient observations, one of the wilder longings of his youth, from which he was not always exempted by age:

To travel the world, by land and sea, from pole to pole; to cross-question life, under every clime, in the infinite variety of its manifestations: that surely would be glorious luck for him that has eyes to see; and it formed the radiant dream of my young years, at the time whenRobinson Crusoewas my delight. These rosy illusions, rich in voyages, were soon succeeded by dull, stay-at-home reality. The jungles of India, the virgin forests of Brazil, the towering crests of the Andes, beloved by the condor, were reduced, as a field for exploration, to a patch of pebbles enclosed within four walls.Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does not necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau herborised with the bunch of chick-weed whereon he fed his canary; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre discovered a world on a strawberry plant that grew by accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre, using an armchair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most famous of journeys around his room.[290]This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the bushes. I go the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a hundred times, by short stages; I stop here and I stop there; patiently I put questions and, at long intervals, I receive some scrap of a reply.The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis perches; each bush where the pale Italian Cricket strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the Leaf-cutter.If cruising among the nooks and corners of the garden do not suffice, a longer voyage shows ample profit. I double the cape of the neighbouring hedges and, at a few hundred yards, enter into relations with the Sacred Beetle, the Capricorn, the Geotrupes, the Copris, the Decticus, the Cricket, the Green Grasshopper, in short with a host of tribes the telling of whose story would exhaust a lifetime. Certainly, I have enough and even too much to do with my near neighbours, without leaving home to rove in distant lands.Nevertheless, it were well to compare what happens under our eyes with that which happens elsewhere; it were excellent to see how, in the same guild of workers, the fundamental instinct varies with climatic conditions.Then my longing to travel returns, vainer to-day than ever, unless one could find a seat on that carpet[291]of which we read in theArabian Nights, the famous carpet whereon one had but to sit to be carried whithersoever he pleased. O marvellous conveyance, far preferable to Xavier de Maistre’s post-chaise! If I could only find just a little corner on it, with a return-ticket!I do find it. I owe this unexpected good fortune to a Brother of the Christian Schools, to Brother Judulien, of the La Salle College at Buenos Aires. His modesty would be offended by the praises which his debtor owes him. Let us simply say that, acting on my instructions, his eyes take the place of mine. He seeks, finds, observes, sends me his notes and his discoveries. I observe, seek and find with him, by correspondence.It is done; thanks to this first-rate collaborator, I have my seat on the magic carpet. Behold me in the pampas of the Argentine Republic, eager to draw a parallel between the industry of the Sérignan Dung-beetles and that of their rivals in the western hemisphere.11

Heaven forfend that I should complain! The gathering of ideas does not necessarily imply distant expeditions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau herborised with the bunch of chick-weed whereon he fed his canary; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre discovered a world on a strawberry plant that grew by accident in a corner of his window; Xavier de Maistre, using an armchair by way of post-chaise, made one of the most famous of journeys around his room.[290]

This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the bushes. I go the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a hundred times, by short stages; I stop here and I stop there; patiently I put questions and, at long intervals, I receive some scrap of a reply.

The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis perches; each bush where the pale Italian Cricket strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the Leaf-cutter.

If cruising among the nooks and corners of the garden do not suffice, a longer voyage shows ample profit. I double the cape of the neighbouring hedges and, at a few hundred yards, enter into relations with the Sacred Beetle, the Capricorn, the Geotrupes, the Copris, the Decticus, the Cricket, the Green Grasshopper, in short with a host of tribes the telling of whose story would exhaust a lifetime. Certainly, I have enough and even too much to do with my near neighbours, without leaving home to rove in distant lands.

Nevertheless, it were well to compare what happens under our eyes with that which happens elsewhere; it were excellent to see how, in the same guild of workers, the fundamental instinct varies with climatic conditions.

Then my longing to travel returns, vainer to-day than ever, unless one could find a seat on that carpet[291]of which we read in theArabian Nights, the famous carpet whereon one had but to sit to be carried whithersoever he pleased. O marvellous conveyance, far preferable to Xavier de Maistre’s post-chaise! If I could only find just a little corner on it, with a return-ticket!

I do find it. I owe this unexpected good fortune to a Brother of the Christian Schools, to Brother Judulien, of the La Salle College at Buenos Aires. His modesty would be offended by the praises which his debtor owes him. Let us simply say that, acting on my instructions, his eyes take the place of mine. He seeks, finds, observes, sends me his notes and his discoveries. I observe, seek and find with him, by correspondence.

It is done; thanks to this first-rate collaborator, I have my seat on the magic carpet. Behold me in the pampas of the Argentine Republic, eager to draw a parallel between the industry of the Sérignan Dung-beetles and that of their rivals in the western hemisphere.11

To close the history of the Sérignan hermit by opening such remote perspectives is not so inconsistent as it may seem, for, after having obstinately imprisoned himself within the narrow horizon of his village all his life, the Provençal recluse was beginning to be[292]drawn out of it by the intelligent zeal of certain friends, who forced him to make a triumphant tour of France, and we might almost say of the world.

The magic carpet on which they made him sit for this magnificent journey was, however, by no means a borrowed article. It was he himself who had provided it. It was none other than the marvellous series, so rich and so varied, of his entomological works, which had only to be known in order to ensure for the author everywhere the welcome which he deserved, a truly enthusiastic welcome, and the place which was due to him: one of the foremost places among our scientists and our writers.[293]

1Souvenirs,X., pp. 102–109.↑2Souvenirs,II., pp. 1 to 19.↑3Ibid., p. 104.↑4Souvenirs,III., pp. 12–14.↑5Souvenirs,IV., pp. 59–60.↑6Darwin died at Down, in Kent, on the 19th of April, 1882.—A. T. de M.↑7Souvenirs,II., p. 99.↑8Souvenirs,II., p. 160. He makes this declaration in respect of an error which he had incorrectly attributed to Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin, on the faith of an unfaithful translation due to the entomologist Lacordaire. The mistake, which is really Lacordaire’s, not Erasmus Darwin’s, consisted in confusing the Sphex with a common Wasp. Charles Darwin, having informed Fabre that his grandfather had said “awasp,” the French naturalist immediately inserted this correction in a note, in the second volume of theSouvenirs, which I had not yet come across when I cited the passage in question. I can therefore say with M. Fabre: “May this note amend, within the proper limits, the assertions which I made in all good faith.”↑9Darwin died in 1882, and the second volume of theSouvenirsappeared in 1883.↑10Souvenirs,I., pp. 188, 189;II., pp. 103;VI., pp. 25, 166, 203;VII., pp. 8, 9, 57, 161, etc.↑11Souvenirs,VI., p. 70.The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. ix., “Dung-beetles of the Pampas.” There is also mention of Brother Judulien in a long note in vol.V., p. 131;The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, p. 238.↑

1Souvenirs,X., pp. 102–109.↑

2Souvenirs,II., pp. 1 to 19.↑

3Ibid., p. 104.↑

4Souvenirs,III., pp. 12–14.↑

5Souvenirs,IV., pp. 59–60.↑

6Darwin died at Down, in Kent, on the 19th of April, 1882.—A. T. de M.↑

7Souvenirs,II., p. 99.↑

8Souvenirs,II., p. 160. He makes this declaration in respect of an error which he had incorrectly attributed to Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin, on the faith of an unfaithful translation due to the entomologist Lacordaire. The mistake, which is really Lacordaire’s, not Erasmus Darwin’s, consisted in confusing the Sphex with a common Wasp. Charles Darwin, having informed Fabre that his grandfather had said “awasp,” the French naturalist immediately inserted this correction in a note, in the second volume of theSouvenirs, which I had not yet come across when I cited the passage in question. I can therefore say with M. Fabre: “May this note amend, within the proper limits, the assertions which I made in all good faith.”↑

9Darwin died in 1882, and the second volume of theSouvenirsappeared in 1883.↑

10Souvenirs,I., pp. 188, 189;II., pp. 103;VI., pp. 25, 166, 203;VII., pp. 8, 9, 57, 161, etc.↑

11Souvenirs,VI., p. 70.The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, chap. ix., “Dung-beetles of the Pampas.” There is also mention of Brother Judulien in a long note in vol.V., p. 131;The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles, p. 238.↑

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